Undergraduate Creative Writing

The Discipline of English offers a number of undergraduate courses that have a creative writing component. Since the courses are not offered each year, you need to check the English website for what is offered. These can include:

1. NEW FOR 2010: Creative Writing: the essentials
   A practical introduction to creative writing through prose and poetry. It covers ways to begin and develop a sustained and reflective writing practice, including revision and editing. The course consists of a series of exercises designed to develop essential aspects of the creative writer's craft and a selection of connected readings from classical and contemporary literature in a range of approaches, styles and techniques.
2. A Festival of Contemporary Writing (offered in the Adelaide Festival of Arts Writers' Week years (even years) with Dr Susan Hosking.
   
3. Self Writing (not offered every year) with Dr Amanda Nettelbeck.
4. The Short Story: An Introduction to Creative Writing (not offered every year)
   This course is designed as an introduction to the craft and culture of short fiction and prose. Students will be introduced to a range of contemporary and some earlier short texts from American, Australian, British, European and other literatures. The course aims, through creative writing and reading, to broaden students' understanding and appreciation of the range of writing in short forms. The short story is particularly appropriate for encouraging comparative analysis between literary cultures and phases of literary development. Students will be encouraged to use short texts as models for their own creative explorations. An anthology of short texts, especially tailored for the course, will be made available to students.
5. Reading and Writing Poetry (not offered every year)
   The course looks at poems in traditional metres, paying particular attention to the technicalities of their versification. It considers poems from many different periods, in a wide variety of traditional forms, using a range of different types of versification. Like the set reader, Bernard Blackstone’s Practical English Prosody: A Handbook for Students (London: Longmans, 1965), the course ‘is intended to help students of English poetry to understand what we may call the “mechanics” of verse. It is not intended to turn anyone into a poet’ (ix). Nevertheless, on the principle that the best way to learn is by doing, students taking the course are required to submit for assessment a number of pieces of verse composed in a range of the different types of metre studied. Associated Professor Tom Burton, who teaches the course, said of students' poems: 'I was quite unprepared for—and delighted by—the high quality of some of the verse produced for the exercises'. The best of these are gathered in the anthology, Beyond Free, produced from the course. Poems offered for publication were submitted anonymously and blind reviewed by eight members of the class, who volunteered to serve on the Editorial Committee.

International students: enrolment

See the international student website for how to apply and the relevant forms. See the following below also for additional requirements.

Undergraduate enrolment 

• Application and Admission
• FAQs on enrolling

Students then have the opportunity to complete graduate studies in creative writing through Honours and Postgraduate programs.